Design heuristics for educative curriculum materials Elizabeth A

Design heuristics for educative curriculum materials

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Supporting inquiry-oriented science teaching with curriculum:Design heuristics for educative curriculum materials

Elizabeth A. DavisJoseph S. Krajcik

University of Michigan

contact info:610 E. University Ave.

1323 SEBAnn Arbor, MI 48109-1259

(734) [email protected]

A paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, SanDiego, April, 2004.

Acknowledgments

This research is funded by a PECASE / CAREER Award grant #REC-0092610, a CLTgrant number #0227557, and a USP grant #0830 310 A605, all from the National ScienceFoundation. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed inthis publication are those of the authors. We thank Jo Ellen Roseman, the students in ED832, andthe CASES and IQWST research groups at the University of Michigan—especially JayFogleman, Kate McNeill, Debra Petish, and Julie Smithey—for their help in thinking about theseideas.


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Abstract

Science teachers must teach meaningful content while ensuring that all of their students are successful. Tomeet these expectations, curriculum materials have been suggested as a way for promoting teachers' learning. Thispaper focuses on the design of educative curriculum materials, asking, How can curriculum materials be designed tobe most helpful for a range of teachers? Designers need to think systematically about how educative features maysupport teachers in engaging in particular learning processes and in addressing particular learning challenges.Toward these ends, the authors develop and provide rationales for an initial group of nine design heuristics. Thesedesign heuristics cover a range of teaching activities, in the arenas of subject matter knowledge as well aspedagogical content knowledge for science topics and science inquiry. The heuristics are grounded in the challengesteachers face and are illustrated by examples from existing curriculum materials intended to be educative forteachers. In light of these design heuristics, the authors conclude with an exploration of some of the challenges in thedesign of educative curriculum materials, such as the tensions between providing guidance and choice.

Introduction

Science teaching is difficult. In light of current reforms, science teaching has becomeeven more challenging. Teachers must teach meaningful content that helps students meetimportant learning goals in the context of authentic, inquiry-oriented science activities whileaddressing the needs of increasingly diverse learners and ensuring that all of their students aresuccessful. To meet these expectations, curriculum materials have been suggested as a way forpromoting teachers' learning. So-called "educative curriculum materials" may play anincreasingly important role in the professional development of teachers. This paper focuses onthe design of educative curriculum materials.

It has been almost a decade since Ball and Cohen (1996) proposed that curriculummaterials can be designed with the intent of promoting teacher learning. They argued thatteachers' learning needs to be situated in their practice (see also Ball & Cohen, 1999; Putnam &Borko, 2000), and curriculum materials are clearly well situated in teachers' daily practice. Thusthey are a good site for potentially promoting teacher learning.

Educative and Typical Curriculum Materials

First, what makes curriculum materials potentially educative for teachers? We argue thatpotentially educative curriculum materials should help increase teachers' knowledge in specificinstances of instructional decision-making but should also help teachers develop more generalknowledge that they can apply in new situations. Curriculum materials that are designed to beeducative for teachers, then, might help teachers better understand the reasons for makingparticular instructional decisions, so the teachers would be more likely to apply similar reasoningin different instructional contexts. Such curriculum materials might also help teachers useinformation in their actual teaching, thus situating it directly in their practice rather than keepingit distanced from their practice.

What do materials like this look like? Collopy (2003) described three main features thatshe identified as potentially educative for teachers in the mathematics curriculum materials sheinvestigated. First, the curriculum materials included subject matter support at the start of eachunit. Second, the curriculum materials included "teacher notes" that provided "information aboutmathematical content, representations, and pedagogy" (p. 290)—in other words, aspects of


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subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. Finally,the curriculum materials included sample dialogues intended to help teachers anticipate students'likely ideas as well as to promote teachers' reflection through illustrating the kinds of discussionsthat might occur during instructional activities. This stands in contrast to typical curriculummaterials, which provide instructional sequences but not all these types of supplementaryinformation intended to help the teachers using the materials.

Our focus in this paper is on the ways in which curriculum materials can be purposefullydesigned or written (by curriculum writers) to help promote teacher learning.1 As such, we usethe term "educative curriculum materials" to indicate materials that are intended to be educative.Of course, to be truly educative, the materials must not only have features intended to promoteteacher learning but also must be taken up by the teachers who use the materials in a particularway—just as a curriculum could be termed "reform oriented" but whether students learn reformoriented practices depends on how individual students and teachers take up the learning tasks.Furthermore, teacher learning will likely be best promoted by a set of complementaryapproaches, not a single one. But realistically, teachers' use of curriculum materials may occuroutside of any long-term professional development associated with the curriculum materials;considering how to make the curriculum materials educative, then, may be an important steptoward promoting teacher learning given the realities of teaching and schools (Collopy, 2003).

Teacher Learning from Educative and Typical Curriculum Materials

Recent empirical work has demonstrated that teachers can and do learn from curriculummaterials. For example, Remillard (1999) studied how two teachers used an elementarymathematics textbook (not designed purposefully to be educative for teachers). One arena inwhich curriculum materials might impact teacher learning and practice centers on selecting anddesigning tasks. Here, the text played a major role in teachers' learning and practice. Bothteachers used the text extensively, though in different ways; one teacher learned from selectingand using tasks from the textbook, and the other teacher learned from using the textbook asinspiration for inventing her own tasks. In other arenas of teaching, though, the text played a lesscentral role in promoting teacher learning.

Teachers may benefit most from the sections of the curriculum materials that help themanticipate and deal with their students' ideas and other aspects of their pedagogical contentknowledge (Collopy, 2003; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002). One could imagine, based on theseempirical studies, that a text designed to promote learning in Remillard's (1999) enactment andadaptation arena might be more effective, since an important aspect of "reading students" whileenacting and adapting tasks includes anticipating and dealing effectively with their ideas.

How teachers use and learn from curriculum materials varies depending on severalfactors. These include what arena of teaching the teacher is working in at the time; what thespecific characteristics are of the curriculum materials they are using; what the teacher's ownbeliefs are about content, learners, learning, and teaching; how those beliefs are aligned (ormisaligned) with the goals of the curriculum; and whether the teacher persists in reading the

1 Teachers, too, can be considered to develop curriculum during their enactment, as is discussedlater in this paper. We are mainly concerned here, however, with the written text.


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materials over time (Collopy, 2003; Remillard, 1999; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002). These factorsinteract in a complex and dynamic relationship (Lloyd, 1999).

Curriculum materials can be designed to promote teacher learning and teachers do,indeed, learn from curriculum materials. We do not yet, however, have specific heuristics toguide the design of curriculum materials to make them educative for teachers. This is theproblem that this paper addresses. Specifically, we ask the question, How can curriculummaterials for science be designed to support teacher learning?

Designing Educative Curriculum Materials

Although we do not yet have design heuristics to guide the development of curriculummaterials intended to be educative for teachers, we do have some high-level guidelines that wecan draw from the literature. In their seminal piece, Ball and Cohen (1996) described the rolesthat they saw curriculum materials could play in promoting teacher learning. Ball and Cohen'srecommendations were consistent with or, in some cases, provided a framework for much of theresearch that has since elaborated on these suggestions and illustrated how they play outempirically.

First, curriculum materials could help teachers learn how to listen to and interpret whatstudents say—that is, to anticipate what learners may think about or do in response toinstructional activities (Ball & Cohen, 1996; see also Remillard, 2000). Other, additional kindsof support for pedagogical content knowledge are likely to be of help, as well, includingknowledge about instructional representations (Schneider & Krajcik, 2002; Wang & Paine,2003).

Second, curriculum materials could support teachers' learning of subject matter (Ball &Cohen, 1996; see also Schneider & Krajcik, 2002; Wang & Paine, 2003).

Third, curriculum materials could help teachers consider ways to relate units during theyear (Ball & Cohen, 1996). Addressing an aspect of this suggestion, Wang and Paine (2003)found that the teacher they observed using a mandated curriculum benefited from the objectivesprovided in the text; the objectives fostered productive reflection for the teacher in consideringhow she presented the lesson in the context of the larger curricular picture.

Finally, Ball and Cohen (1996) suggested that curriculum materials could make visiblethe developers' pedagogical judgments. Typically the reasoning behind instructional decisions isinvisible to the users of the materials, but making the reasoning visible would help teachers makedecisions about how to best adapt curriculum materials. Remillard (2000), too, argues thatcurriculum materials should "speak to" teachers about the instructional tasks or the ideasunderlying the tasks rather than focusing only on guiding their actions without helping themunderstand the reasons for recommendations. Similarly, Shkedi (1998), building on Eisner(1990), states that curriculum materials should educate teachers at the same time as they promoteteachers' autonomy. Including rationales for particular decisions should help teachers be betterpositioned for interpreting and adapting reform-oriented practices (Ball & Cohen, 1996;Remillard, 2000).


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In addition to these recommendations from the literature on educative curriculummaterials, we argue that one further goal educative curriculum materials might try to attain is topromote a teacher's pedagogical design capacity, or his or her ability to use personal resourcesand the supports embedded in curriculum materials to adapt curriculum to achieve productiveinstructional ends (Brown & Edelson, 2003). This may be especially important given the pooroverall quality of many typical science curriculum resources (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002).Teachers' interactions with curriculum materials can be conceptualized as an act of design ordevelopment (Ben-Peretz, 1990; Brown & Edelson, 2003; Remillard, 1999); curriculum writersdevelop a text that teachers use, but then teachers go through a second level of curriculumdevelopment as they decide how to enact lessons and actually engage in that enactment(Remillard, 1999). Each of the four suggestions for educative curriculum materials outlinedabove could contribute, in some way, increasing both the curricular and personal resourcesavailable to a teacher and thus helping teachers find productive ways of changing the curriculum.

Developing the Design Heuristics for Educative Curriculum Materials in Science

Though listing potentially educative features and generating general recommendationsare both important starts for designing educative curriculum materials, these approaches do notgo far enough in providing guidance for curriculum designers. Instead, we need to ground designheuristics in the specific challenges that teachers face. Designers need to ensure that the featuresthey incorporate actually serve a purpose for the teachers who use the materials.

We use the term "design heuristics" rather than the more common "design principles"because of the current state of the field in this area. Heuristics are rules of thumb that are likelyto be useful. We can make recommendations that are likely to be useful for those writingcurriculum materials. These recommendations, though, are not certain enough to be termedprinciples, which would imply a level of empirical testing that we, as a field, have not yetundertaken.

Because the challenges teachers face differ depending on their subject area, we havebounded our design heuristics here to the subject area of science—still a broad range ofdisciplines, but more specific than trying to deal with all subject areas at once. We anticipate,though, that these design heuristics should also help those interested in curriculum materials forother subject areas; many of the issues cut across domains, though of course, some of thespecifics change.

In determining our design heuristics, we build on the approach of Quintana and hiscolleagues (in press), who combined theory-driven analyses with inductive ones to develop adesign framework for the design of ways to scaffold students' inquiry in learning technologies.For our theory-driven analysis, we ask, What are the challenges teachers face? For our inductiveanalysis, we ask, What are the ways in which those challenges could be addressed throughcurriculum materials?

Areas of Teacher Knowledge Addressed by the Design Heuristics

We organize the challenges science teachers face around the types of knowledge theyneed to develop and employ. At a basic level, teachers need to hold general pedagogical


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knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. We focus here onsubject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, because these present such greatchallenges for science teachers and represent areas in which curriculum materials might get themost traction.

Subject matter knowledge includes teachers' knowledge of the content they teach. Thisincludes knowledge of the facts, concepts, and structures of knowledge in the discipline(Shulman, 1986; Cochran & Jones, 1998).

Shulman (1986) articulated the "missing paradigm" of what he called pedagogicalcontent knowledge (PCK); Dewey (1964), too, indicated that effective teachers held far morethan straight subject matter knowledge. Many have elaborated on and extended Shulman's notionof PCK in important ways, both in science (e.g., Gess-Newsome & Lederman, 1999; Magnussonet al., 1999; van Driel et al., 1998, 2002; Zembal-Saul et al., 1999) and in other subject areas(e.g., Ball & Bass, 2000; Grossman, 1990; McDiarmid et al., 1989; Wilson et al., 1987).

PCK comprises multiple components (see Grossman, 1990, and Magnusson et al., 1999,for two related perspectives). Magnusson and her colleagues, for example, describe PCK asincorporating teachers' knowledge about assessment, curriculum, students' ideas, andinstructional strategies. The two most salient to the design of curriculum materials are knowledgeof students' ideas and knowledge of instructional strategies. These components of PCK aretypically considered to be quite specific to teaching particular topics within a subject area. Forexample, one would have PCK for teaching the topic of photosynthesis, in addition to holdingknowledge about teaching the subject of biology and even more general knowledge aboutteaching science.

PCK for Science Inquiry

One of the interesting challenges science teachers face is developing and employing whatwe call pedagogical content knowledge for scientific inquiry. This notion has been touched on inthe literature (e.g., Magnusson et al., 1999; Zembal-Saul & Dana, 2000). Magnusson and hercolleagues, for example, describe both the topic-specific strategies (i.e., activities andrepresentations) and what they call "science-specific strategies (for any topic)" (p. 99) withintheir broader category of PCK of instructional strategies. They give as examples of the science-specific strategies knowledge of the learning cycle or the generative learning model; they saythat "teachers' knowledge of subject-specific strategies for science teaching consists of the abilityto describe and demonstrate a strategy and its phases" (p. 110).

When we say PCK for science inquiry, we mean something slightly different: the PCKthat science teachers need for engaging their students in the essential features of inquiry (NRC,2000), such as asking and answering scientific questions, engaging with scientific phenomenaand models, developing explanations based on evidence, and communicating and justifyingfindings. (Our design heuristics for PCK for science inquiry are organized around these essentialfeatures.) While this is closely connected to the knowledge of science-specific strategies—forexample, a salient aspect of both the learning cycle and scientific inquiry is engaging students inphenomena and having them make sense of those phenomena—scientific inquiry is not aninstructional model with specific phases but rather a set of practices. Furthermore, teachers must


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not only engage their students in these practices; they must also help their students developunderstandings of the inquiry practices themselves. In contrast, students do not need to developunderstandings of the elements of a teacher's instructional model.

We focus on this type of PCK for instructional strategies for inquiry. It may be possibleto develop parallel design heuristics for students' ideas about the components of inquiry, but wedo not provide those heuristics here, focusing instead on the instructional strategies and foldingin some aspects of students' ideas when appropriate.

Why do we consider this to be a type of PCK, rather than more general pedagogicalknowledge? According to Schwab (1964), content knowledge includes both substantive (i.e.,conceptual, factual) and syntactic (i.e., inquiry) knowledge. Typically, PCK is only associatedwith the former. But we argue that there should be PCK associated with syntactic or inquiryknowledge, as well. Petish (in preparation) presents further elaboration of how existingframeworks for PCK can be extended to include PCK for science inquiry.

Bounding the Design Heuristics

We have not bounded our design heuristics to a particular type of science teacher (e.g.,elementary versus secondary, new versus experienced), but we anticipate that different designfeatures may be more or less useful for different types of teachers. We address these differenceswhen we present the design heuristics, by acknowledging for whom a particular challenge maybe most challenging. We also return to the more general point in the discussion.

This initial set of design heuristics is fairly broad. This set is intended to provide startingplaces for an ongoing conversation about the design of curriculum materials that are intended tobe educative for teachers. Empirical work will be necessary to test the situations in which theseheuristics are effective and for whom. In other words, empirical work will need to investigate thecontexts for and constraints on these broad design heuristics.

This initial set of design heuristics covers a range of areas (i.e., PCK for science topics,PCK for science inquiry, and subject matter knowledge). This list of heuristics, however, is notintended to be exhaustive. Heuristics for other aspects of educative curriculum materials arepossible and desirable. For example, curriculum materials can provide guidance for teachers indeveloping more general pedagogical knowledge, for example about assessment. We know fromprevious empirical work (Collopy, 2003; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002) that curriculum materialscan support teachers' learning with regard to PCK. And we know from other work (e.g., Ball &Bass, 2000; Carlsen, 1992) about the important role of subject matter knowledge for teachers. Asa result, these are the areas in which we have focused our attention for now.

Illustrating the Design Heuristics

We illustrate the heuristics and strategies with examples drawn from our own curriculumdevelopment work in the CASES (Curriculum Access System for Elementary Science) and hi-ce(Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education) projects.

CASES is a technology-mediated learning environment provided on the Web(http://cases.soe.umich.edu) aimed at supporting preservice and new elementary science teachers


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as they learn to teach inquiry-oriented science more effectively. CASES incorporates inquiry-oriented unit plans that are intended to be educative for teachers, as well as a personal onlinejournal, an online teacher community discussion space, and other resources for science teaching.Unit plans are made educative for teachers through a variety of features that are intended to worksynergistically. Some of these features include science content background, information aboutstudents' likely alternative ideas, and multiple representations of inquiry. Several of thesefeatures are described in more detail below in our examples.

Researchers from hi-ce use the principles of project-based science (PBS) as a designframework for the curriculum materials they develop. PBS is an approach to teaching andlearning rooted in inquiry pedagogy that is consistent with social constructivist ideas(Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Krajcik, Czerniak, & Berger, 2002). PBS assumes that students needopportunities to construct knowledge by solving problems through asking and refining questions,designing and conducting investigations, gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information anddata, drawing conclusions, and reporting findings. Five theoretical features underlie thisapproach: active construction, situated cognition, community, discourse, and cognitive tools(Novak & Krajcik, in press; Singer, Marx, Krajcik, & Clay-Chambers, 2000). The curriculummaterials developed by hi-ce and widely used in schools are made educative for teachers throughthe inclusion of science background knowledge and suggestions for successful enactment. Theprinted curriculum materials are supplemented by extensive professional development, includingregular workshops and an online resource called Knowledge Networks on the Web (KNOW; seehttp://www.hice.org/know for hi-ce curriculum materials).

Note that by drawing on examples from these particular endeavors, we are purposefullynot limiting our analyses or recommendations to commercially published, print materials. Rather,we are intending to expand the field's notion of what might count as curriculum materials, andhow they might be provided for teachers to use, at the same time as we make recommendationsfor what their content might be.

Design Heuristics for Educative Curriculum Materials for Science

We present nine design heuristics organized around three types of knowledge: subjectmatter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge for science topics, and pedagogical contentknowledge for science inquiry abilities. Each of these knowledge types presents particularchallenges for teachers. For each design heuristic, then, we start with a discussion of thechallenges teachers face, as described in the literature. We note for whom these challenges mightbe especially daunting—new teachers, for example, or elementary teachers, or teachers in urbanor rural schools. Then we present the design heuristic and note any connections to the literaturethat might be appropriate to make; that is, we identify existing design principles orrecommendations from the literature that inform our design heuristic. Each design heuristicincludes statements about what the curriculum materials should provide for teachers, what therationale is behind the ideas being provided, and how the teacher can use these ideas in his or herown teaching. For each design heuristic, we then identify a few strategies that can be applied.These might be grounded in examples we have developed or seen, or they might be ones wecould imagine using. Finally, we present one or more examples of ways the strategies have beenincorporated into our own groups' curriculum development. The design heuristics aresummarized in Table 1.


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Supports for Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Science Topics

Heuristic 1: Curriculum materials should provide teachers with productive physical experiences (including labs,demonstrations, and experiments) that make phenomena accessible to students as well as rationales for why theseexperiences are scientifically and pedagogically appropriate. Curriculum materials should help teachers adapt anduse these experiences with their students. Curriculum materials should also warn of potential pitfalls with specificphysical experiences. Finally, curriculum materials should suggest and help teachers think about productivesequences for experiences.

Heuristic 2: Curriculum materials should provide appropriate instructional representations of scientific phenomenaand support teachers in adapting and using those representations. Curriculum materials should be explicit about whya particular instructional representation is both scientifically and pedagogically appropriate. The curriculummaterials should also help teachers determine the most salient features of each instructional representation andshould provide the reasoning for why it is important for students

Heuristic 3: Curriculum materials should help teachers recognize the importance of students' ideas and help teachersidentify possible or likely student ideas. Curriculum materials should also help teachers gain insight into how theymight be able to deal with the ideas in their own teaching.

Supports for Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Science Inquiry

Heuristic 4: Curriculum materials should provide productive driving questions for teachers to use and should helpteachers identify productive questions they can use with their students at multiple levels, including focus questionsfor guiding a class discussion. Furthermore, curriculum materials should help teachers understand why these areproductive questions, from both a scientific and pedagogical standpoint. Finally, curriculum materials should helpteachers engage their students in productively asking and answering their own scientific questions.

Heuristic 5: Curriculum materials should provide teachers with approaches to help students collect, compile, andunderstand data and observations; help teachers understand the rationales behind these approaches; and help themadapt and use these approaches across multiple topic areas.

Heuristic 6: Curriculum materials should help teachers recognize the importance of sometimes having studentsdesign their own investigations. Curriculum materials should also provide guidance for how teachers can supportstudents in doing so, through providing ideas for appropriate designs and suggestions for improving inappropriatedesigns.

Heuristic 7: Curriculum materials should provide clear recommendations for how to support students in makingsense of data and generating explanations based on evidence they have collected and justified by scientific principlesthey have learned. This should include providing materials for students that support making explanations, but shouldalso include explicit supports for teachers. The supports for teachers should include rationales for why engagingstudents in explanation is important and why these approaches for doing so are scientifically and pedagogicallyappropriate.

Heuristic 8: Curriculum materials should provide lesson-specific suggestions for how teachers can promoteproductive communication among students and between students and teachers in both conversations and studentartifacts. The curriculum materials should also provide rationales for why particular approaches for promotingcommunication are scientifically and pedagogically appropriate.

Supports for Developing Subject Matter Knowledge

Heuristic 9: Curriculum materials should support teachers in developing both factual and conceptual knowledge ofscience content. This should include concepts that are likely to be misunderstood by students. Support should bepresented at a level beyond the level of understanding required by the students, to help teachers be better able to (a)explain science concepts and (b) understand their students' ways of understanding the material. Curriculum materialsshould also help teachers see how the scientific ideas relate to both real-world phenomena and the activities in theunit and why strong subject matter knowledge is important for teaching.

Table 1: The Nine Design Heuristics for Educative Curriculum Materials


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We turn first to design heuristics for supporting the development of PCK for specificscience topics.

Supports for Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Science Topics

As noted above, the most typical conceptualizations of PCK focus on teachers'knowledge for specific topics. We address three components of this type of knowledge here,because we perceive that curriculum materials will be able to make progress on promotingteachers' knowledge in these areas. First, we address teachers' knowledge of engaging theirstudents in specific scientific phenomena (what Magnusson et al. [1999] referred to as scienceactivities within their larger category of instructional strategies in science). Second, we addressteachers' knowledge of using instructional representations. Third, we address teachers'knowledge of their students' ideas.

Heuristic 1: Supporting Teachers in Engaging Students with Topic-Specific Scientific Phenomena

One critical aspect of teachers' PCK is the knowledge they need to effectively engagestudents with phenomena. Such anchoring experiences, bridging analogies (Clement, 1993), orbenchmark lessons (Minstrell, 1989) play crucial roles in helping students develop conceptualunderstandings of scientific ideas. Teachers face specific challenges here. For example, at alogistical level, to engage students in actual phenomena, teachers need to obtain physicalmaterials (no small task) and make sure the experiment or demonstration will work in theclassroom. Conceptually, teachers need to know the most salient aspects of the lab, demo, orexperiment and how to help students see or experience those salient aspects. For example, theyneed to know what students should observe versus what they should ignore, and how to helpstudents deal with the ambiguity sometimes at play in activities like these. Furthermore, teachersneed to be able to think about how a set of experiences might best be sequenced.

These challenges may be especially problematic for teachers in schools with relativelyfew resources or for elementary teachers or other teachers who teach several subjects. Theseteachers may lack the time to test experiments or demonstrations in advance. Teachers with lesssolid subject matter knowledge themselves may have greater difficulty in differentiating amongappropriate experiences or salient features within one. Finally, new teachers may face morechallenges in this arena than do more experienced teachers, since they may be unaware of pitfallsassociated with conducting particular labs or demonstrations.

Our first design heuristic describes how curriculum developers might try to address someof these challenges. The heuristic states:

Curriculum materials should provide teachers with productive physical experiences(including labs, demonstrations, and experiments) that make phenomena accessible tostudents as well as rationales for why these experiences are scientifically andpedagogically appropriate. Curriculum materials should help teachers adapt and usethese experiences with their students. Curriculum materials should also warn of potentialpitfalls with specific physical experiences. Finally, curriculum materials should suggestand help teachers think about productive sequences for experiences.


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From a logistical standpoint, curriculum materials could, for example, provide a movie ofhow a teacher can set up complicated apparatus or information about potential pitfalls associatedwith conducting a particular experiment or demonstration. For example, experienced teachersknow to avoid trying to demonstrate the phenomenon of condensation on an extremely dry day.Curriculum materials could warn teachers of this concern, and suggest the discreet use of ahumidifier in the room to remedy the problem.

At a conceptual level, curriculum materials could provide ideas to help the teacher knowhow to point students toward the most important aspects of a phenomenon. For example, thematerials could suggest what to help students look for on a slide under a microscope, includingphotographs or diagrams to help teachers identify the relevant aspects themselves. Curriculummaterials might also provide information about why a particular hands-on experience isimportant and how it helps to promote the objectives of the lesson.

One important learning goal in middle school science focuses on students' understandingthat air is matter. To show that air is matter, a teacher would need to demonstrate the air hasmass and takes up space. Unfortunately, to show that air has mass is difficult. Curriculummaterials needs to suggest to teachers appropriate demonstrations and activities that can makeotherwise inaccessible phenomena accessible to children. Many curriculum materials suggestthat teachers demonstrate that air has mass to students by blowing up a balloon using air fromtheir lungs and mouth. Indeed, the mass of the balloon after blown up does increase—because airfrom one's lungs contains moisture. If a balloon is filled using an air pump, the mass of theballoon does not increase because the balloon is buoyed up by an equal mass of air it displaces.The “What is the Quality of our Air?” unit developed by hi-ce suggests that instead the teachershould blow-up a partially deflated volleyball using an air pump to show that air has mass. Afterpumping up the volleyball, it has a measurably greater mass than the partially deflated ball. Thevolleyball does not have the buoyancy effect because the volume of the volleyball does notchange substantially and the amount of air pumped into the volleyball is substantial. The hi-cecurriculum materials explain to teachers why this demonstration works and provide guidanceabout how to use the demonstration with students. Curriculum materials need to suggest toteachers the most powerful and appropriate demonstrations and activities that illustrate otherwiseinaccessible phenomena, and provide explanations for why other approaches are lessscientifically and pedagogically appropriate. The volleyball demonstration is one example.

Heuristic 2: Supporting Teachers in Using Scientific Instructional Representations

Another aspect of pedagogical content knowledge is knowledge of appropriateinstructional representations. Instructional representations include pictures, diagrams,simulations, visualizations, models, or other ways of representing a conceptual idea. Instructionalrepresentations need to be both scientifically and pedagogically appropriate (McDiarmid et al.,1989; Davis & Petish, accepted pending revisions). But teachers may not even know thatinstructional representations can vary in their effectiveness (Davis & Petish, accepted pendingrevisions; Zembal-Saul et al., 2000). Furthermore, though teachers may be able to developinstructional representations on their own based on teaching experience (van Driel et al., 1998),familiar instructional activities (Appleton, 2003), and real-world applications of scientificknowledge (Davis & Petish, accepted pending revisions), those representations may not alwaysbe scientifically or pedagogically appropriate. For example, preservice teachers acting as science


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learners tend to overgeneralize analogies included in curriculum materials, generateinappropriate personal analogies, and rely on personal analogies more extensively than onanalogies from the written curriculum materials (Yerrick et al., 2003).

Teachers need to ensure that the representation relates to the stated purpose of the lesson.Teachers also need to recognize the most salient aspects of the representation. This is especiallyimportant when the representation is a model; students often neglect to disentangle how modelsare similar to and different from phenomena in the real world.

These challenges are problems especially for elementary teachers or other teachersteaching outside of their subject specialization, because these teachers may not have thesophisticated science knowledge required to be able to judge scientific appropriateness ofinstructional representations. New teachers, too, may face particular challenges. Because they arenew, they do not yet have a repertoire of representations or even representation types from whichthey can draw. They may also have trouble judging how pedagogically appropriate aninstructional representation is.

Schneider and Krajcik (2002) recommend that curriculum materials should provideguidance about how to use a representation, how it represents science ideas to students, and howthe representation supports student thinking. We build on this notion to develop our designheuristic 2, which states:

Curriculum materials should provide appropriate instructional representations ofscientific phenomena and support teachers in adapting and using those representations.Curriculum materials should be explicit about why a particular instructionalrepresentation is both scientifically and pedagogically appropriate. The curriculummaterials should also help teachers determine the most salient features of eachinstructional representation and should provide the reasoning for why it is important forstudents.

Curriculum materials, then, should employ strategies that can promote this heuristic. Anycurriculum materials (i.e., educative or not) should make sure the instructional representations itincludes are scientifically and pedagogically appropriate. But curriculum materials that areintended to be educative for teachers would need to go further. These materials might alsoexplain why an instructional representation works (i.e., both scientifically and pedagogically)and what its limitations are (i.e., with regard to its pedagogical and scientific appropriateness).For models in particular, curriculum materials might also give suggestions for helping studentssee connections between a model and the actual scientific phenomenon it represents. How arethey similar? How are they different? These suggestions should be based on a sense of themodel's most salient features.

At a more general level, curriculum materials might remind teachers that instructionalrepresentations can vary in how scientifically and pedagogically appropriate they are. They canalso provide general recommendations about how one can assess how appropriate aninstructional representation is. As teachers become more knowledgeable, they should develop theability to develop their own productive instructional representations.


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For example, hi-ce curriculum materials include examples of representations that teacherscan use to represent nanoscopic processes. One important learning goal at the middle schoollevel is to show that the conservation of mass is explained by the rearrangement of atoms fromreacting materials. How to represent this nanoscopic process poses challenges for teachers. Thechallenge is even greater when teachers try to match the macroscopic phenomena with thenanoscopic representation. The “How Can I Make New Stuff from Old Stuff?” curriculummaterials suggests to teachers that students build gumdrop models of reacting materials and thenphysically take them apart to form the products that are formed. In one lesson, students reactcopper and acetic acid to form copper acetate and hydrogen gas. They then build nanoscopicrepresentations of this process using gumdrop models (gumdrops stuck together using toothpicks). This representation is particularly salient because students see that they cannot have extrahydrogen atoms but rather that the hydrogen atoms join to form hydrogen gas. The materialsexplain to teachers the importance of this representation and linking it to the macroscopicphenomena.

Heuristic 3: Supporting Teachers in Anticipating, Understanding, and Dealing with Students' Ideasabout Science

Another important aspect of PCK for science teachers is anticipating, understanding, anddealing appropriately with students' ideas about science. Ball and Cohen (1996) note, in fact, thatthis is one of the critical ways in which they could imagine curriculum materials supportingteachers. Thus, our third design heuristic focuses on this area. We use students' ideas inclusivelyto incorporate the range of relevant and reasonable ideas kids have about the world—includingthose that are non-normative according to the scientific community.

What are some of the challenges science teachers face with regard to students' ideas?First, we know that even expert teachers have areas in which their subject matter knowledge isweak, and weak or inflexible subject matter knowledge may preclude teachers from being able toanticipate, understand, and deal with their students' ideas (Ball & Bass, 2000). Even with strongsubject matter knowledge, teachers may not anticipate their students' ideas (e.g., Smith & Neale,1989; van Driel et al., 2002). Teachers may also not know how to deal with students' ideasappropriately (van Driel et al., 2002).

These challenges are especially problematic for new teachers. New teachers do not yethave extensive experience with hearing how students think about different topics. One ingredienttypically assumed to be necessary for the development of extensive PCK is experience inteaching (e.g., van Driel et al., 1998). We argue that through educative curriculum materials orother supports, teachers can be given some advantage to help them develop PCK more rapidlythan they might without help. We acknowledge, however, that typical new teachers are likely tohold less extensive PCK than their more experienced counterparts.

A design heuristic should provide guidance for curriculum developers in helping teachersovercome the challenges associated with students' ideas. Our design heuristic 3, then, is:

Curriculum materials should help teachers recognize the importance of students' ideasand help teachers identify possible or likely student ideas. Curriculum materials shouldalso help teachers gain insight into how they might be able to deal with the ideas in theirown teaching.


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We build on Schneider and Krajcik's (2002) design principle for educative curriculummaterials, which stated that curriculum materials should give teachers guidance about students'likely initial understanding and experiences, their probable responses, and the appropriate levelof their understandings.

To help teachers learn what their students' ideas may be, curriculum materials can, forexample, provide a list of likely student ideas, based on research (e.g., Driver et al., 1985;Osborne & Freyberg, 1985). Many curriculum materials stop here (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002),though they might easily connect the students' ideas to the normative science ideas, why holdingthe ideas might be problematic in terms of students' learning, how difficult each idea is likely tobe to overcome, and the ways in which teachers could address the ideas.

But sometimes, it may be difficult to provide a list of students' ideas. Although theresearch literature can be very valuable in generating such lists, the vast majority of suchresearch has been done in the physical sciences. In the life or earth sciences, then, curriculummaterials might instead need to provide teachers with suggestions about how they couldthemselves identify students' ideas. For example, curriculum materials might provide a pretestfor teachers to administer to students or a suggestion for a concept map teachers could askstudents to generate. Then, the curriculum materials might provide suggestions for what theteachers should look for in the resulting student work.

Curriculum materials could also provide access to video footage of a classroom in whichstudents are discussing their ideas about the particular topic at hand. Such video might, forexample, show a teacher conducting a "science talk" (Gallas, 1995) with her students at thebeginning of a unit, eliciting their ideas without commenting on them or attempting to correctthem. A video like this might or might not show typical student ideas, depending on the specificideas that came up amongst the students, but it might be quite helpful in demonstrating to ateacher what the facilitation of such a discussion might look like.

To be truly helpful—perhaps especially for the new teachers who face the most dauntingchallenges in this area—curriculum materials should also help teachers learn how to deal withtheir students' ideas in the classroom. One strategy for accomplishing this is to providesuggestions for which lessons within a unit address which specific student ideas that have beenidentified through research. Another is to describe how teachers could modify specific lessons inreaction to specific student ideas.

Each CASES unit provides teachers with a set of three to seven student ideas that theresearch indicates students at that age might hold. These are described in short paragraphs—fromone to four sentences, typically. Associated with each idea is a brief discussion of the normativescientific idea as well as a brief description of how one might deal with the idea in the classroom.Sometimes this final entry is a straightforward pointer to a lesson plan within the curriculummaterials. For example, elementary children often think that there is no difference between airand wind. For this alternative idea, the CASES curriculum materials note that the "Can wecapture the wind?" lesson plan in the weather unit addresses this idea. Other times, it isappropriate to give suggestions about language to use (or avoid) or experiments or thoughtexperiments students might do, in addition to the lessons provided in the unit. In the CASESweather unit, therefore, the curriculum materials also suggest that teachers should be quite


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careful in how they use the words "wind" and "air." (See Figure 1.) Suggestions like theseprovide contextualized, situated guidance for the teacher.

Figure 1: A screenshot showing how CASES supports teachers in anticipating and dealing withstudents' ideas.

Supports for Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Science Inquiry

We turn next to a different variety of pedagogical content knowledge—one that we see asmissing from most descriptions of PCK yet critical to effective science teaching. Curriculummaterials have great potential for being able to promote the development of this PCK for scienceinquiry, as we call it, and so we present five heuristics in this section. As noted above, thesedesign heuristics focus on aspects of PCK for instructional strategies in inquiry.

Science inquiry, as defined by the National Research Council (1996, 2000), Project 2061(1993), and others (e.g., Krajcik et al., 2002) involves a few key components. For example,students should be engaged in asking and answering scientific questions. They should work withphenomena. They should sometimes have the opportunity to plan and design their owninvestigations, rather than only completing investigations designed by the teacher. They shoulddevelop explanations based on evidence. And finally, they should communicate and justify theirfindings. Though other aspects of scientific inquiry exist, this set describes a range of activitytypical in many descriptions of (idealized) scientific activity.

We present heuristics addressing each of these aspects of science inquiry next. In all ofthese, we build on the work of Schneider and Krajcik (2002), who noted (at a general level) thatfor various science-specific strategies (e.g., aspects of inquiry), curriculum materials shouldprovide guidance about how to use the strategy, how the strategy develops science ideas, andhow the strategy supports student thinking.

Because our design heuristics here are grounded in the challenges teachers face, it isimportant to note one overarching challenge bearing on teachers' work in all the areas covered inthis section: many teachers lack inquiry experiences themselves. Most adults were not taughtscience through inquiry in their elementary, secondary, and college coursework (Smith, 1999).Furthermore, most science teachers do not have professional experience as scientists on whichthey can draw. As a result, many teachers of science may lack the experiences with scientific


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inquiry that would make teaching through scientific inquiry come a bit more naturally. This lackof experience manifests itself, of course, in the more specific inquiry practices, such as engagingstudents in asking and answering scientific questions, as we discuss next.

Heuristic 4: Supporting Teachers in Engaging Students in Questions

A first important component of science inquiry involves having students ask and answerscientific questions. But teachers face numerous challenges in engaging students in questions.For example, we know that it is difficult to design questions to drive instructional units; suchdriving questions (Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, & Soloway, 1994) should be meaningful,worthwhile, contextualized, sustainable, feasible, and ethical. The worthwhile characteristicmerits special attention: Driving questions must be related to specific learning goals based onstandards students are expected to achieve. Without such grounding, a question (and thus a unit)may be engaging for students, but it will lack scientific substance.

Though it is difficult for teachers to map out appropriate questions to use for theirinstruction in advance, it is perhaps even more challenging for them to ask scientifically andpedagogically appropriate questions in real-time in the classroom. Because teaching involveshundreds or thousands of real-time decisions each day and to make productive decisions requiresextremely flexible subject matter knowledge (Ball & Bass, 2000), making good decisions aboutwhat questions to ask, answer, postpone, probe, and ignore is extremely complex.

A third challenge teachers face with regard to using questions effectively in their scienceteaching relates to having students ask and answer their own questions (Krajcik et al., 1998).Teachers must, for example, balance the tension between having students develop their ownquestions, on the one hand, and meeting district or state objectives, on the other. Additionally,teachers must ensure that the questions students are asking are not only scientifically appropriate,but also can feasibly be answered by the students themselves. Fostering such work again requiresa strong understanding of the subject area but also considerable expertise in this specific area ofscience inquiry.

Teachers with lower subject matter knowledge in the topic at hand may experiencesignificant challenges like these. Without sufficient subject matter knowledge, teachers may notbe able to identify scientifically and pedagogically appropriate questions as opposed toirrelevant, tangential, or derailing questions.

A design heuristic for supporting teachers in scientific questioning should addresschallenges like these. Our design heuristic 4 states:

Curriculum materials should provide productive driving questions for teachers to useand should help teachers identify productive questions they can use with their students atmultiple levels, including focus questions for guiding a class discussion. Furthermore,curriculum materials should help teachers understand why these are productivequestions, from both a scientific and pedagogical standpoint. Finally, curriculummaterials should help teachers engage their students in productively asking andanswering their own scientific questions.


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Curriculum materials can use various strategies to accomplish this heuristic. For example,curriculum materials could describe how teachers could frame a lesson around a question, givingspecific suggestions for how to engage students in considering the question. In a lesson intendedto have students generate the questions themselves, the curriculum materials might provide a listof questions students might ask about the topic, providing guidance to help the teacher anticipatethe questions, consider in advance what makes those questions scientifically and pedagogicallyappropriate or inappropriate, and develop some strategies for what to do if students do notgenerate questions of the type suggested in the curriculum materials. Other guidance mightdiscuss why asking their own questions is challenging for students.

The CASES materials attempt to support teachers in using questions effectively. Drivingquestions (for the unit and for each week) are presented and the rationales for using thesequestions are provided. In some lessons, a "lesson question" is presented in the text of the lessonplan along with guidance for the teacher for using the question. For example, the lesson planmight include ideas about how one could introduce the question, what students' responses mightbe, and how one could follow up on some of those responses. Furthermore, CASES provides tipsso teachers can easily find out about "why should I use questions in my science teaching?" andother relevant issues.

Within a lesson, if questioning is an important aspect of the lesson, it is highlighted witha special graphic. Furthermore, a narrative "image of inquiry" describing how one or morefictional teachers dealt with questioning might be presented. These narratives are associated withspecific lessons within the unit and included in the lesson plans themselves. For example, in theCASES astronomy unit for middle school, one lesson describes how a new teacher named Jennytried to incorporate students' questions into her unit, even though she knew she needed generallyto follow her original plan in order to meet district objectives. (See Figure 2.)

Jenny knows that the way she sets up the unit in the beginning determines the climate of the class for thenext month or so. She really wants students to feel like this topic is important (and she’s worried thatmany of them won’t be very interested because they won’t feel like astronomy impacts their daily lives,unlike their recent water quality unit). She decides to spend an entire day having students ask questionsabout the universe instead of just giving them a homework assignment to come up with a few questions.Her students come up with really exciting questions like “Where did the universe come from?” “How dowe know black holes exist if we can’t see them?” “How many other solar systems are there?” and “Doaliens exist?” She knows that many of these topics won’t be covered in her unit, so she researches to findseveral websites where students can ask questions of an astronomer (see the ideas and resourcessection of this unit ). When students have free time, she allows them to email scientists or research thesequestions on their own. After the day of questioning, Jenny selects all the questions having to do with thesun and stars and uses them as an introduction to the Life Cycle of Stars lesson. She tries to use studentquestions whenever possible throughout the unit.

Figure 2: An image of inquiry from CASES illustrating how fictional teacher Jenny incorporates studentquestions into her unit.

Although CASES attempts to support teachers in using questions effectively, it may bethat some aspects of the approach are more effective than others. For example, a recent casestudy of three new teachers using the CASES materials determined that for at least one of the


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teachers, the lesson questions (embedded within the lesson plans themselves) were taken upeffectively, whereas the driving questions and weekly sub-questions (on separate pages of theunits) were largely ignored (Petish, in preparation). Format and structure of the curriculummaterials, then, may play at least as important of a role as content does—a point that we take upagain in the discussion.

Heuristic 5: Supporting Teachers in Engaging Students with Collecting and Analyzing Data

Teachers need general strategies for supporting kids in the salient aspects of experiencingand making sense of phenomena. Challenges arise in helping students make careful observations,avoid confusing observation and inference, collecting data, compiling data, and seeing trends(e.g., Lehrer & Schauble, 2002; Linn & Songer, 1991; Metz, 1995, 2000; Reiser et al., 2001).

These challenges may be especially problematic for new teachers who do not yet hold arepertoire of cross-topic strategies and who may not yet even see the value of consistency acrosstopics. These challenges may also be especially problematic for teachers with poorunderstandings of science and scientific experimentation.

Our fifth design heuristic describes how we might address challenges like these. Theheuristic states:

Curriculum materials should provide teachers with approaches to help students collect,compile, and understand data and observations; help teachers understand the rationalesbehind these approaches; and help them adapt and use these approaches across multipletopic areas.

An important aspect of any science curriculum materials (educative or not) is to providesupports to help students collect, compile, and understand data and observations. For example,curriculum materials should provide teachers with data tables they could give to their kids tohelp them keep track of their data or questions to guide students' observations. But educativecurriculum materials should go further, and help teachers see how they can use approaches likethis consistently across multiple topics—thus helping their students to develop important inquiryabilities. Rationales, then, might become especially important; the materials might explain why aparticular approach is both pedagogically and scientifically appropriate.

How can these strategies be incorporated into actual curriculum materials? A lowerelementary (K-2) unit on plants from CASES illustrates one approach. The unit includesnarrative images of inquiry describing how a fictional first-grade teacher named Peg attempted toengage her young students in scientific phenomena. Figure 3 shows a narrative illustrating thechallenges Peg anticipated that her students would face in making detailed observations of a seedand her approaches for helping them overcome those challenges. Though the suggestions hereare grounded in the study of a particular topic, teachers can apply similar techniques (e.g., in alower elementary classroom, connecting observation to the five senses) to any other topic area inwhich physical observation is important.


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Peg’s 1st graders were busy drawing their seeds. Peg noticed that many students drew a circular shapeand filled it in with one color. She knew that her students wouldn’t be able to write extensive observations,but she knew that they were capable of noticing more detail. She decided to model the process forstudents. She selected an apple seed, passed it around, and collected ideas from the class about whatthey noticed. She tried to emphasize the importance of describing how it looked, felt, sounded andsmelled (she referred to a 5 Senses poster in her classroom). Then, she tried to incorporate theobservations into a large drawing on poster paper. This gave students a model for how to do their ownobservations.

Figure 3: An image of inquiry from CASES illustrating how fictional teacher Peg supports her students inmaking detailed observations of plants.

Heuristic 6: Supporting Teachers in Engaging Students in Designing Investigations

While not all or even most instruction should necessarily fall at the student-directed endof the inquiry continuum (NRC, 2000), it is important that students occasionally have theopportunity to plan and design their own investigations. Typically, this plays itself out as havingsmall groups of students working independently on their own projects. For example, toward theend of a unit on plants, a teacher might ask students to design different ways of investigating thequestions they have already generated about plants. Small groups of students might worktogether to develop and implement a design for their investigation, and then work together tomake sense of the observations they make.

This is one of the most challenging areas for teachers, because it involves supportinggroups of students working on different tasks, taking the usual complexities of teaching andcompounding them considerably. At a logistical level, it is hard to manage a classroom where allthe kids are doing something different. Teachers must keep track of what each group is doing,and it is hard even to make sure all the necessary supplies are on hand.

Teachers face even more important conceptual challenges here, as well. For example, ateacher needs to make sure that even though each group is working on a different investigation,each is still working toward a goal that helps them address the relevant learning objectives forthe unit. Especially when students spend a large percentage of their time working on their owninvestigations—more authentically appropriating scientific practices—they may be less and lesslikely to meet the standards without the teacher working hard at guiding students towardproductive areas of focus.

Teachers also must provide appropriate guidance for each group. This guidance isespecially critical at the initial design phase. If students set goals that are unrealistic or notpedagogically or scientifically appropriate, they may end up being frustrated by the designexperience and may end up learning very little from the entire activity. If, on the other hand, theteacher is able to guide them toward productive questions to ask and designs to make, studentscan learn a great deal.

These challenges are problems especially for teachers who hold less subject matterknowledge, because without subject matter knowledge, it is hard to know if a student


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investigation is going to be productive for getting at the relevant content or not. Thus, teachersteaching outside of their major subject area may face especially daunting challenges insupporting this aspect of science inquiry.

Our sixth design heuristic provides guidance to curriculum developers to help themaddress some of these challenges. Design heuristic 6 states:

Curriculum materials should help teachers recognize the importance of sometimeshaving students design their own investigations. Curriculum materials should alsoprovide guidance for how teachers can support students in doing so, through providingideas for appropriate designs and suggestions for improving inappropriate designs.

What strategies can curriculum materials use in light of this heuristic? Instead of stating"answers will vary", curriculum materials could help teachers anticipate what is likely to happenand determine how they can make it as productive as possible. First, curriculum materials canprovide suggestions for investigations that would be appropriate for students to design. Such alist of suggestions gives teachers a sense of the range of the possibilities to expect. Also usefulwould be suggestions about how to guide students toward coming up with these ideas themselvesor working toward these ideas from their initial ideas or, in the case of students that need a greatdeal of scaffolding in this task (such as an early elementary classroom), simply noting that theteacher may need to do much of the design work alongside the students.

But curriculum materials should go further, since a list and some general guidance wouldnot be especially helpful if teachers did not know how to determine what makes some designsmore fruitful than others. So curriculum materials should provide ideas about investigations thatwould also be inappropriate for students to design, with reasons they might be inappropriate(e.g., impractical, not scientifically relevant) and ideas for how to guide students toward moreproductive designs.

Most scientific investigations proceed by making modifications from previous designs.Teachers using hi-ce curricula can support students in doing their own investigations by using asimilar technique. Teachers can first model the process, seeking student involvement during theprocess and then allow students to do their own investigations as the teacher gives studentsfeedback on their work.

In the hi-ce project “Can good friends make me sick?” students explore the growth ofbacteria (Hug & Krajcik, 2002). The teacher begins by asking the question, “Do I have bacteriaon my hands?” The teacher then demonstrates how to culture bacteria using agar plates and anincubator. The next day the teacher demonstrates how to count the bacteria colonies. A non-contaminated plate is used as a control. Using the data, students draw conclusions regardingwhether bacteria are on our hands. This is the first stage in the process—the teacher models theprocedures. Next, students ask their own questions. Students may ask questions such as “Doeswashing my hands make a difference?”, “Does using a different type of soap make a difference?”and “Is there bacteria on my desk?” They then design their own experiment using the techniquesthe teacher demonstrated. This cycle of modeling-investigation-feedback is one techniquethat teachers can use to support children in the inquiry process (Krajcik, Czerniak, &Berger, 2002).


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The curriculum materials stress how important it is for the teacher to model these variouscomponents of inquiry because middle school students have difficulties in doing inquiryinvestigation. The materials also provide detailed instructions for the teacher so that she or hewill know how to model the various components from asking questions to drawing conclusions.The KNOW system contains video clips of this lesson so teachers can see how it is enacted.Finally, the curriculum materials include the rationale for modeling the design of investigationsas well as a reminder to engage the students actively in the demonstration. (See Figure 4.)

AREAS OF DIFFICULTY FOR THE STUDENTS IN THIS INVESTIGATION

Students have difficulty in carrying out investigations successfully. This is why this instructional strategywas selected. Students (hopefully) will have more success at completing an investigation if one is firstmodeled and explained for them. But students need to be active participants during the teacherdemonstration. Please make certain to include student suggestions and comments in the teacherdemonstration.

Figure 4: Guidance from hi-ce's "Can good friends make me sick?" unit providing a rationale andguidance for effectively using the teacher demonstration.

Heuristic 7: Supporting Teachers in Engaging Students in Making Explanations Based onEvidence

Another aspect of science inquiry is engaging students in making explanations based onevidence (NRC, 2000). Of course, teachers face challenges here, as well. First, it is hard forstudents and even adults to connect claims with evidence (e.g., Kuhn, 1989) and to makeexplanations (Ranney & Schank, 1998), though they can do so when provided with appropriatescaffolding (Bell & Linn, 2000; Sandoval & Morrison, 2003). Because of this difficulty forstudents, it is hard for teachers to know what kinds of supports will best help their students makesense of and develop an explanation of that phenomenon. This is compounded when studentgroups—each working on the same investigation, lab, or experiment—report varying results. Forexample, some groups might report that the temperature of an unstirred cup of hot water goesdown more quickly than that of a stirred cup, while for other groups the reverse is true. Teachersmay know that experimental error could account for problems like these—the two thermometersbeing used were not calibrated correctly, or the water in the cups were different temperatures tobegin with, or any number of other factors—but the trick is to know how to help students bothaccount for what might have happened in terms of the running of the experiment and stilldevelop a scientific explanation of the phenomenon at hand. Curriculum materials rarely providesuch guidance (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002).

These challenges are especially problematic for low subject matter knowledge teachers orteachers teaching outside their major area, because they do not necessarily know the scientificexplanations themselves or how the explanations could be connected to data or evidence.

Our design heuristic 7, then, describes how curriculum developers might addresschallenges like these. It states:


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Curriculum materials should provide clear recommendations for how to support studentsin making sense of data and generating explanations based on evidence they havecollected and justified by scientific principles they have learned. This should includeproviding materials for students that support making explanations, but should alsoinclude explicit supports for teachers. The supports for teachers should includerationales for why engaging students in explanation is important and why theseapproaches for doing so are scientifically and pedagogically appropriate.

For example, curriculum materials can provide guidance for teachers about how and whyto engage and scaffold kids in making explanations, in the context of curricular supports forstudents for making explanations. In a related vein, curriculum materials can provide mini-scriptsfor introducing difficult ideas like explanations, claims, evidence, and reasoning. These mini-scripts could help the teachers better understand these constructs, as well.

Curriculum materials can also make explicit the connections teachers can make betweena hands-on experience and the scientific content. Though students ultimately must construct theirown explanations, teachers also of course need to be able to provide clear explanations tostudents.

For example, the “How I can I make new stuff from old stuff?” curriculum materialsfrom hi-ce emphasize scientific explanations. For teachers unfamiliar with “scientificexplanations,” a rationale for teaching about scientific explanations is presented in a discussionof explanations. This section explicitly defines a scientific explanation as involving a claim,evidence, and reasoning. It then walks through the claim, evidence, and reasoning in a studentexample and discusses how teachers can support students' construction of scientific explanationsat a general level. Lesson plan 6 then gives specific ideas and materials for introducing scientificexplanations to students, and the following lesson plans embed constructing explanations into thecurriculum materials and provide rubrics for teaches to assess student explanations.

Heuristic 8: Supporting Teachers in Promoting Scientific Communication

A final aspect of science inquiry is scientific communication. Students need to learn tocommunicate and justify their findings in ways that are consistent with how scientists do.Science can involve its own language, with special vocabulary and particular ways of expressingideas, and this language can be very difficult for students to use (Lemke, 1990; Rosebery,Warren, & Conant, 1992). Teachers need to help students see how to engage in scientific talkwithout using it to obfuscate meaning. Furthermore, teachers may themselves be unfamiliar witheffective scientific communication. Thus, it can be hard for teachers to foster scientificcommunication in their classrooms.

As with many of the other challenges teachers face, they may be especially problematicfor teachers with low subject matter knowledge. For example, without this knowledge, a teachermay be unsure as to whether she or he is leading the discussion to a productive end point or not.

Our design heuristic 8, in an attempt to guide curriculum developers toward meetingsome of these challenges, states:


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Curriculum materials should provide lesson-specific suggestions for how teachers canpromote productive communication among students and between students and teachers inboth conversations and student artifacts. The curriculum materials should also providerationales for why particular approaches for promoting communication are scientificallyand pedagogically appropriate.

What strategies can be used in light of this design heuristic? First, educative curriculummaterials can provide examples of probing questions to ask students. These questions might beintended for a whole class discussion, or, alternatively, for a teacher's conversation withindividuals or small groups of students.

Curriculum materials can also provide suggestions for how to structure an artifact thatrequires students to communicate and justify their ideas. (Alternatively, of course, curriculummaterials could provide such an artifact.) The artifact might include, for example, a KWL chart,a T-chart, or a set of prompts for helping students listen to other students. The curriculummaterials could include rationales for using such an approach as well as suggestions forappropriate ways the teacher could use it.

Some curriculum materials provide extensive support for helping students understandscientific communication and the nature of scientific inquiry more generally through fictionalscientists' notebooks (Palincsar et al., 2001). These student materials, too, can serve as educativefor teachers.

CASES incorporates two complementary types of support into lessons. These two typesof supports—guidance-on-demand (Bell & Davis, 2000) plus embedded guidance—supportteachers in developing aspects of PCK for science inquiry. The guidance-on-demand is notspecific to a particular lesson, but rather provides more generic support for engaging in particularinquiry practices. These are clickable tips listing questions teachers might have; clicking on thelink takes the teacher to a small pop-up window providing an answer to the question. Most of theguidance-on-demand is incorporated into lessons in pairs. Typically, a lesson will include a tipabout why one would want to do a particular thing (engage students in questions, for example, orhelp them use evidence to make explanations). This provides the rationale that Ball and Cohen(1996) noted could be a critical aspect of educative curriculum materials. It is usually followedby a tip about how one could accomplish the practice. This provides the more specific guidancethat new teachers, in particular, are likely to need. Figure 5 provides an example from CASEShaving to do with scientific communication.


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Why should students communicate and justify their findings?

Communicating findings is what scientists do in order to share their work with others

* When communicating findings, students are refining and extending their ideas, learning to critiqueothers, and improving important communication skills

* Communicating findings provides other students an opportunity to ask questions, examine evidence,identify faulty reasoning, and suggest alternative explanations

* When communicating and justifying findings, students should use the data they collect to answer ascientific question. You may also want to have students apply their knowledge to a new real worldquestion or situation

How can I help my students communicate and justify their findings?

* Make sure students know that they will always be expected to share the findings of their investigationswith classmates

* It is important to develop guidelines for what is expected of students when they share their findings.Students should be aware of these expectations

* Students should be expected to explain what they did during their investigations, why they did it thatway, what they learned from it, and how their findings help them to answer a question

* Make sure students use evidence from their investigations to justify the claims they make

* Encourage students to ask themselves How do I know? about their conclusions to help them justify theirfindings.

Figure 5: Clickable guidance-on-demand hints from CASES about why and how to promote scientificcommunication.

The second form of guidance is embedded into the lesson plans themselves. Whileteachers need to click on the guidance-on-demand in order to see it, the embedded text is specificto the particular lesson and may be especially important for teachers who print out the lessonplans, rather than reading them online. This kind of guidance is inherently more situated than isthe guidance-on-demand, which is general across lessons. Figure 6 provides an example ofembedded guidance from a CASES unit on plants. The instructions remind the teacher that eachchild should make a contribution, that teachers should help students think about an extended setof audience members, and that sharing scientific knowledge is an important aspect of learningscience.


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Assessment

Part 3. The final assessment should be the sharing of the results (see unit assessment). This can beorganized in any way that seems appropriate. However, make sure that each child has a contribution.Students can give a presentation to the class, make a poster, or share results with another class. Ifpossible, help students think of audiences outside of the class. For example, the grounds supervisors orlocal park. Even if the result is one class-composed letter, this will allow students to see the importance ofwhat they are learning and the process of sharing scientific knowledge.

Figure 6: Embedded guidance in a CASES lesson on plants making suggestions about promotingscientific communication within a lesson's assessment.

Supports for Developing Subject Matter Knowledge

We started our discussion of design heuristics with those associated with PCK, becausewe know that PCK is one area in which curriculum materials are especially able to supportteachers' learning (Collopy, 2003; Schneider & Krajcik, 2002; Wang & Paine, 2003). Yetteachers clearly also need to hold strong, integrated, flexible subject matter knowledge (Ball &Bass, 2000). Helping teachers develop their subject matter knowledge, then, may be anespecially important area of focus for curriculum materials. It is worthwhile to consider howcurriculum materials might better support teacher learning of science content, because of howcrucial this knowledge is to being a successful teacher.

Heuristic 9: Supporting Teachers in the Development of Subject Matter Knowledge

Many teachers of science teach outside of their subject area (U.S. Dept. of Ed. – NCES,2003). Elementary teachers typically teach all subjects, and so it is not surprising that very fewhave strong backgrounds in science (e.g., Jason LaTurner, 2002; Stoddart et al., 1993; Stofflett &Stoddart, 1994)—they are the exception, not the rule. Yet we also know that the subject matterknowledge a teacher holds is related to how a teacher teaches in the classroom (Carlsen, 1992;Hashweh, 1987).

These challenges may be especially daunting for elementary teachers, who need expertisein many subject areas (not just science) as well as in all of the disciplines of science (i.e., life,earth, and physical sciences). New teachers, too, may face greater challenges, because they havenot yet had the opportunity to teach (and thus learn from teaching) many topics. But evenexperienced secondary teachers may hold insufficient subject matter knowledge. For example, aveteran secondary science teacher with a strong (but dated) background in biology may considergenetics from the standpoint of Punnett squares, not the genome project. Similarly, a physicsteacher may have extensive understanding of Newtonian physics, but to the exclusion of othernewer ideas in physics (e.g., quantum mechanics, nanotechnology) that may be more intriguingto students.

Others have identified subject matter knowledge as being a place where curriculummaterials might be able to make a difference in teachers' knowledge. Ball and Cohen (1996)stated that materials could (and should) support teachers in developing improved subject matter


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knowledge for the topics they are teaching. Similarly, Schneider and Krajcik (2002) noted thatcurriculum materials should provide teachers with an "explanation of science content to a levelbeyond that suggested for students" (p. 228). We build on these recommendations to develop ourfinal design heuristic, which states:

Curriculum materials should support teachers in developing both factual and conceptualknowledge of science content. This should include concepts that are likely to bemisunderstood by students. Support should be presented at a level beyond the level ofunderstanding required by the students, to help teachers be better able to (a) explainscience concepts and (b) understand their students' ways of understanding the material.Curriculum materials should also help teachers see how the scientific ideas relate to bothreal-world phenomena and the activities in the unit and why strong subject matterknowledge is important for teaching.

While it might be somewhat helpful to provide text explanations of science topics to helpteachers extend their subject matter knowledge, text of this sort is likely to be insufficient(Bransford et al., 1999; Linn et al., in press). The subject matter knowledge discussions includedin typical curriculum units are usually relatively decontextualized, so the knowledge thediscussions help develop remains inert with regard to its actual use in the classroom. Instead, thedesign heuristic here recommends situating the subject matter knowledge (Putnam & Borko,2000) in ways that help teachers use the knowledge flexibly in the classroom (Ball & Bass,2000).

What are some strategies curriculum materials designers could use to provide suchsupport? The strategies we report here build on what we understand about promoting anylearner's knowledge of a science topic or subject area. Curriculum materials might, for example,provide access to effective visualizations of a phenomenon or suggestions of activities one couldperform to demonstrate a phenomenon oneself. Curriculum materials could also discuss (or,better yet, discuss and demonstrate) how scientific phenomena are connected to real-worldphenomena. Curriculum materials can also situate relevant subject matter knowledge in waysthat are especially important for teachers. For example, textual discussions could be grounded inthe context of what the students are doing in the classroom. The materials could also juxtaposenormative scientific ideas with students' likely alternative ideas as well as pedagogical ideas soall of them are contextualized in a teacher's practice (as discussed in design heuristic 3 andillustrated in Figure 1).

CASES curriculum developers write the science background section of the unit asconversational answers to the driving questions for each week of the unit, using lay terminologyas much as possible, with scientific terminology carefully defined. The CASES weather unit, forexample, answers questions such as "How do our observations help us predict tomorrow'sweather?" and "What will the weather be like next season?" The CASES curriculum materialsalso make explicit connections to the real world wherever possible. In the weather unit, forexample, connections are made to puddles on the street in the discussion of the water cycle; thescience background section states, for example, "The water in a puddle does not simplydisappear when it evaporates. Instead, the sun heats the water, which turns it into watervapor (a gas) which is distributed throughout the air." Furthermore, to situate the subjectmatter knowledge text in the context of lessons (rather than only as a stand-alone introductory


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section of the unit), CASES includes the relevant parts of the subject matter knowledge in thelesson plans themselves, in addition to providing the unit-level, overarching discussion. Finally,because CASES is an online resource, CASES provides links to relevant websites within thetextual discussion. CASES developers especially try to point teachers toward exceptionalvisualizations or animations or graphics that complement the text. For example, the weather unitlinks to an animation about how the earth's tilt on its axis causes the earth to experience seasons.Altogether, these approaches extend typical treatments of the science background included incurriculum units, and help move teachers toward more active integration of their knowledge.

Conclusions

We have described nine design heuristics for educative curriculum materials. It isimportant to remember, though, that any curriculum materials can potentially serve to beeducative for teachers. In particular, features of curriculum materials that scaffold students canalso scaffold teachers. For example, teachers tend to learn a great deal from their use of thestudent sheets included in curriculum materials (Freeman & Porter, 1989) and indeed learn fromcurriculum materials not expressly designed to be educative (Remillard, 1999, 2000).Nonetheless, carefully considering the features that might make curriculum materials even moreuseful for teachers is a critical step toward using this tool far more effectively for promotingchange.

Challenges, however, abound. Here, we discuss challenges in designing educativecurriculum materials, followed by a discussion of areas for future research, including challengesin researching teachers' use of the materials.

Challenges in Designing Educative Curriculum Materials

Two major and interrelated tensions arise when considering the design of educativecurriculum materials. The first centers on determining an appropriate amount of guidance for theteacher. The second centers on the design of materials that are appropriate for different sorts ofteachers.

Tensions in Determining an Appropriate Amount of Guidance

Teachers have busy schedules. They are constantly considering and selecting theirlearning goals, preparing for their next class, assessing student work, thinking through the unitthey have just taught or will start teaching next month—all in addition to what they do when theyare actually in front of a class (literally or figuratively). It is understandable, then, that there is asignificant practical problem in designing educative curriculum materials: teachers simply do nothave the time to read vast amounts of material—no matter how useful the materials might be.One question to ask, then, is how much detail should be provided in a set of curriculummaterials? For any teacher, reading through reform-oriented curriculum materials is a challenge.Adding educative aspects can cause the curriculum to balloon out of proportion, making it far toolong. Yet without the educative aspects, the curriculum may not be enacted in a way that is intune with the goals of the reforms.

We see several questions related to this issue. For example, how explicit should theeducative curriculum materials be in providing rationales? Should a designer be explicit all the


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time? Doing so will undoubtedly cause frustration for some teachers who want only theinstructions, especially given that some of the rationales will necessarily become redundant whenincluded across multiple lessons within a unit or across multiple units. Yet other teachers thriveon knowing the reasoning behind suggestions that are being made.

Another question to ask is how prescriptive should the materials be? When curriculummaterials provide too many choices, the selections teachers make may not always promote thereform intended by the writers of the materials (Remillard, 1999). Ball (personal communication,June 18, 2003) has likened learning to teach to learning to become a surgeon. Just as we do notexpect a surgeon to invent a new procedure from scratch each time she sees a patient, we shouldnot expect a teacher to invent a new teaching practice for every new class or every new topic.Some prescription, then—some telling of "here's what you could do"—is both necessary andappropriate.

But every human body is different, and so an expert surgeon applies a standard procedurein a different way with each patient. So, too, will an expert teacher apply standard approachesdifferently with different groups of students, on different days, or in the context of differenttopics. A part of being an expert is knowing how and when to make such adjustments. Ateacher's pedagogical design capacity describes the teacher's ability to draw on the resources athand to make productive changes to a set of curriculum materials (Brown & Edelson, 2003). Afurther question to ask, then, is how best can curriculum materials promote the development ofthis pedagogical design capacity? The design heuristics provided here—by describing rationalesfor suggestions and providing assistance in using the suggestions—should each work to promotethis capacity, especially when provided alongside clear recommendations for instructionalapproaches.

Yet being too prescriptive and ignoring or dismissing teachers' autonomy may also makethe curriculum materials less effective. The new science curriculum materials of the 1960s, forexample, were not consistently successful in part because they sometimes failed to take intoaccount the teacher's role in enacting (and thus making decisions about) the instructionalrecommendations (Welch, 1979) and because associated professional development did notsupport teachers in becoming facilitators rather than dispensers of information (Krajcik,Mamlok, & Hug, 2000). The "proper" level of prescription remains an open question.

These issues relate to the specific features and characteristics of curriculummaterials—one aspect of the dynamic relationship between teachers and curriculum (Lloyd,1999). And so this leads us to the next tension in designing educative curriculum materials:designing for different types of teachers.

Tensions in Designing for Different Teachers

Individual teachers interpret, use, and learn from curriculum in very different ways(Collopy, 2003; Remillard, 2000; Schneider & Kracjik, 2002). It stands to reason, then, thatgroups of teachers, too, will vary in their use.

How would educative curriculum materials differ for new teachers versus moreexperienced teachers? The discussion above of the design heuristics would indicate that in


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general, new teachers need more guidance than do more experienced teachers. For example,educative curriculum materials intended for new teachers might include more rationales andmight be more prescriptive than are materials designed for teachers who have more experienceand are more likely to feel comfortable making choices. Since PCK is often described as beingso heavily dependent on teachers' experience (e.g., Magnusson et al., 1999; van Driel et al.,1998), educative curriculum materials aimed at new teachers may also require more extensivesupport for developing PCK. On the other hand, educative curriculum materials for moreexperienced teachers might include guidance for engaging in more challenging teachingpractices.

A second distinction between teachers is the grade they teach. How would educativecurriculum materials differ for elementary teachers versus secondary teachers? Since elementaryteachers tend to hold less extensive subject matter knowledge than do their secondarycounterparts (Anderson & Mitchener, 1994), perhaps educative curriculum materials intended forelementary teachers would need to provide more extensive or a different kind of support fordeveloping subject matter knowledge.

Alternative Structures for Delivering Curriculum Materials

Clearly we need to think about the importance of format and structure as well as contentof educative curriculum materials. We may also need to think about alternative approaches topresenting curriculum. CASES (Davis et al., 2004) and KNOW (Fishman, 2003) are twoexamples of ways of presenting educative curriculum materials online, and supplementing themwith extensive supports for teachers. By providing educative curriculum materials online, wehave the opportunity to provide far more information along the lines of the design heuristics wehave presented here, using many different media. For example, rather than just providing textmaterials, the systems can incorporate audio and visual records of teachers' enactment of lessonsand dynamic visualizations of science concepts. Teachers can pick and choose to select theinformation they think will help them.

These online systems are introduced to teachers in a way that can make them becomeuseful for teachers in both the short- and long-term. CASES is introduced in elementary sciencemethods courses, and KNOW is introduced through professional development experiences forteachers in the Detroit Public Schools.

But experiences with both of the projects indicate that online solutions may not solve theplethora of problems that arise in trying to promote teacher learning through educativecurriculum materials. For example, teachers print out the lesson plans from CASES rather thanreading them online—and as a result, they necessarily miss some of the educative aspects thatthe CASES designers intended as "guidance on demand" that the teachers could click on whenthey needed it. Of course, the CASES team could simply embed all of the guidance into the textof the lesson plans, but then the ballooning size of the curriculum materials becomes an evengreater problem. As becomes increasingly clear, the issues are all so interrelated that astraightforward solution seems far off at times.


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Future Research

Future research will have to overcome challenges not just in designing educativecurriculum materials, but also in researching them. The basic question here is, How do we knowif the curriculum materials really are educative for teachers? Answering this question requiressolving some of the big problems in teacher education. For example, it involves measuringteacher learning and characterizing their practice as well as connecting teacher learning toteacher practice and connecting both of these to student learning. Teacher education researchlacks good ways of making these connections (Wilson & Berne, 1999). Answering the questionalso requires us to be able to map effects of specific features of the curriculum materials tospecific aspects of the teachers' learning. But how can we even get access to how a teacher readsthe materials, for example? We can sit with them as they think aloud about the lesson plans (E.Smith, personal communication), rely on self-report (Collopy, 2003), or make inferences basedon what we see in their practice (Schneider & Krajcik, 2002). For materials provided online, wecan track what they click on and how long they spend on a particular page. All of these methodsprovides us with some important insights. Yet none of these solutions seems truly adequate forunderstanding how a teacher interacts with the curriculum materials in order to plan for anupcoming lesson. Methodologically, we need additional solutions or ways of combiningsolutions like these to be even more effective.

The design heuristics provided here must be tested empirically. We wonder about issueslike, How do specific kinds of supports in educative curriculum materials help teachers developspecific understandings? What is the effect of the format of educative curriculum materials? Andwhat is the effect of the delivery medium for educative curriculum materials? The designheuristics must also be tested in terms of generality. To what extent are they applicable in fieldsother than science? What kinds of changes must be made to increase that applicability?

Finally, returning to the tensions described above, future research must investigate whatsupports teachers want, need, and are willing to use. How much support is too much? What is thecost, and what is the benefit, of adding particular kinds of supports? And how does thiscost/benefit analysis differ by individual teacher and by the different types of teachers, and howcan we design materials that will educate some without alienating others?

Although the design heuristics presented here offer some guidance, they do not yetprovide a solution to all the problems. As a field we have, however, made great progress inconsidering the ways in which curriculum materials can promote teacher learning. We encouragethe field to continue this exploration and to systematically test and refine the design heuristics wehave presented here.


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